Infected
by starfishify
Summary: The one I loved was infected. I thought I could save him, redeem him. It was my belief in redemption that caused me to think this, and so it was this belief that caused the downfall of everyone I love. Warning: kind of gruesome, it is a zombie story. (It's not really a fanfic, just a zombie story I posted here)
1. The Infected

The story I am about to tell is not a happy one. Not only does it not begin happily, it does not end happily, and so if you are looking for something to brighten your day, I suggest you cease reading immediately.

But if you are looking for the truth, then by all means, continue.

The story starts with a girl; she is me. Don't get too attached to her, because things do not end well for her, and certainly not the way she hoped they would. There came a point in her life– in my life– in which I had come to realize two very important things:

First, I was in love.

Second, the one I loved was not among the living.

No, he was definitely not alive, but then, neither was he dead. Well, I suppose he was dead, but not in the usual sense of the word; the life within him had indeed departed, but the thing that was left behind did not cease to walk the earth.

Let me back up. Perhaps you have heard of Z-Day: that fateful day in human history when everything –anything - went horribly, horribly wrong. It started with a virus, a thing so small, so beneath the range of human sight that its true potential never seemed to really sink in. . . until Z-Day. No one knew where it came from, or why, but within twenty-four hours the virus had swept through all of London, and in twenty-eight days, had left its bloody trail swiped across the face of England.

I suppose this particular virus was not the worst way to die; in fact it killed the host within a few hours of infection – a relatively short and easy way to go. The really horrible part of the virus, then, remained for those left behind. You see, once the virus had killed you, snuffed out all traces of consciousness, it was free to take control of the brain. The result was an abomination of nature: a reanimated corpse; not alive, yet still capable of motion; not conscious, yet still having horrible animal-like urges. The virus-controlled host had only one purpose in its ghastly half-life: to spread. And to do that, it had to keep the dead infected body alive – it had to feed.

To feed was to survive, to ensure the continuation of the virus. It is spread through blood, saliva, and other bodily fluids. Once these fluids have entered your body – through your mouth or open cuts or, more often, by a bite from the infected – there is no going back. You have only a few hours to live, a few hours to distance yourself as far as possible from the ones you love, lest the corpse you leave behind rise again and be the downfall of them all.

I remember Z-Day like it was yesterday, a black mark burned on my brain for all eternity. It started with the rising of the recently deceased, crawling out of the morgues and clawing their way up through the dirt of their freshly-placed graves. I can still see it: the pale twisted hands breaking through the earth, dragging up the ghastly head with them: the eyes, blank and distant; the mouth, twisted in eerie inhuman groans. Once they had escaped – and no one was too eager to try and stop them – they spread the virus among the living.

It was frightening to see the dead haunting the streets, their inhuman moans and screeches sending chills down my spine. It was even worse to see them chase down and devour some pour soul unlucky enough to cross their path, perhaps in some last-minute desperate escape plan. Even if they were not eaten, they became infected, and had only a few hours to live before the virus did its dirty work.

The infected were the untouchable, shunned from the rest of society. Once you'd come in contact with the infected, you were no longer seen as a human being, but as something to get far away from as fast as possible. Never before have I seen families so easily broken apart, the infected deserted by their loved ones without a second thought, left alone to rot and die, and then to rise again. God forbid you told the others you'd been bitten, lest they try and rid the world of you before your time is up.

There was only one way to kill – no, to destroy – the living dead, and that was removal of the head or destruction of the brain. Never before has the world been so ugly; never before have I seen brothers and sisters turn on each other so suddenly, desperate to escape alive. Those of us who survived were not left unscarred.

I survived. The one I loved, as I have already revealed, did not. The funny part was, I never even knew him – knew him alive, I mean. Not really. He never even told me his name. After he died, and rose again, some part of me knew he was gone – that the thing in front of me was no longer the man I loved. But there was another part of me that believed I could bring him back, redeem him, find some trace of my loved one still buried within that twisted breathing corpse. How could I have been so foolish?

It was my love that caused me to not give up on him. And so, in the end, I suppose it was my love that caused the downfall of everyone I loved.

I could try and forget; I could keep my sad gruesome tale from the rest of the world and let it die with me. But one thing stops me: redemption. It was my belief in redemption that led me to try and save him. It is that belief now that leads me to write this now: the hope that some part of me can be redeemed from the sins of which I so unwittingly committed.

They told me I was wrong to try and save him, wrong and young and foolish. Now I see they were right. I will tell the story, and when it is done, you may judge me as you will.


	2. Outbreak

I remember the day I met him; I doubt I shall ever forget it. I was nineteen, had just started college. My brother and I lived with our aunt and uncle in a nice house in suburbia; we had since before we could remember. Z-Day had happened only a few years ago; most of the undead had been rounded up and destroyed by now, but every now and then you heard of an outbreak on the news. As soon as the word got out, everything halted to a stop. Shops would close, mothers pulled their children out of school, people would be dashing down the streets as if there was somewhere to run to, somewhere to hide.

Of course most of the time the site of the outbreak was miles away, safely beyond the bounds of our happy little bubbles, and the knowledge that a Quarantine Team would be on it in a heartbeat gave us all relief. The threat of the infected became less of a worry and more of a part of modern life; I've heard what it was like to live in Europe at the time of the Black Plague. It became a part of them, woven into their culture. People became gloomier, more paranoid; works of art and literature were filled with images of death and decay. Hundreds of years later, and our modern evolved society had become exactly the same.

As we grew used to it, the threat of outbreak affected less and less of our everyday lives. Life will go on. Every morning I got up and took the public bus down to the local college, only a few miles away.

The day I first met him was the day I sat next to him on the bus; there were no empty seats left, so I sat next to him and thought nothing of it. He was about my age, tall, dark-haired; good-looking, but I thought nothing of it. It turns out I sat next to him the next day and the day after, and the day after that, and so on. It just became habit. But not once did I say hello, not once did I ask his name – the only communication that passed between us was the occasional polite smile of recognition.

Every day I sat next to him on the ride down to the college, and sometimes he would have a sketchbook on his lap. I would try to peer over sometimes and see what he was drawing; he was quite good from what I could see. He drew things that he saw, city scenes out the window, or some mysterious figure perched in the back of the bus. It became the highlight of my day to ride the bus and see what new creation he was working on, and then to look around and see if I could spot his model. I didn't even know his name.

One day I suppose I strained my neck a little too far to see over his shoulder, and he spotted me. He wasn't angry, he didn't pretend not to notice and shift subtly away as most people would have done; he only smiled at me and he asked, "Would you like to see?"

It was the first time I had heard his voice. I nodded yes.

He tilted the sketchbook toward me and I saw my own face gazing up from the paper. I think it was that moment that I fell in love with him.

We started talking after that, every now and then, a little polite conversation as we rode the bus each day, but never once did we exchange names or addresses or telephone numbers – God I wish we would have. All the time we wasted – it can never be retrieved.

One day – I'll remember the day as long as I live – I got on the bus and my usual seat was taken. Some old woman had decided to sit next to him; he gave me a kind of look that said "sorry." I nodded and kept walking until I reached an empty seat next to an old man.

I'll never forget that old man's face. He was much more shriveled and lined than a man of his age should be. His wispy hair and unkempt beard spoke of hard times, and his clothes looked dirty and bedraggled. He never once looked at me, only stared down at the floor, his eyes blank and hopeless.

I could feel myself falling asleep, slipping slowly into the twilight zone between sleep and awake. When I finally woke up, it was a few minutes before I realized the old man was dead; I just looked over and saw that he had slumped forward against the seat.

"Sir?" I tried to shake him awake. "Sir, are you alright?"

When he did not stir, I began to panic. I shook him more and more violently, started screaming God knows what, until half the bus was staring at me wordlessly.

The bus driver looked back. "Something wrong back there?" he asked.

At this point there were tears in my eyes. "I – I think he's dead!"

There were murmurs as people began to stir. A woman stepped forward. "I'm a doctor," she said. "Let me see him." She bent down next to him and felt for a pulse.

"I'm driving to the hospital, it's only a few blocks down," the driver announced, and this was generally considered a good move - why, I don't know, the man was obviously already dead.

He must have been dead for about an hour; I didn't know how long I'd been asleep. It was then I saw it.

I raised the man's limp arm and stared at his skin, which had what looked like a bite mark on it. A human bite mark. It had broken the skin, and it was still fresh.

Unspeakable horror hit me. You'd have to have grown up in my world to understand the terror I felt, a world where the constant threat of infection had been hammered into you since you were a schoolchild.

I dropped the limp bitten arm and leapt to my feet, backing away from the dead man's corpse. _My God_, I thought_, how long have I been sitting next to that man? Did I come in contact with him? Could it_, the thought made a long cold shiver run down my spine_, could it have possibly spread to me?_

The doctor, still bent over the dead man, saw my fear and did not comprehend. She then picked up the limp arm I had been looking at, and a look of blank horror passed over her face.

She looked at me. "How long has this man been sitting here?" she asked it calmly, rationally.

I was too frightened to answer; I only stood, blankly staring, shaking my head.

She stood and gripped me by the shoulders. "How long?" Her voice was becoming more desperate, more fearful; the calm little light of reason and rationality that lit the world was quickly going out.

"I said _how long_? _Did you see this man get bit_? For God's sake, speak to me! _Who bit him?!_"

"I don't know!" I sputtered. "He was sitting there when I got on the bus!"

There was a groan, a horrible soft little groan. I knew in an instant from where it had come, and I could feel my heart come to a stop. Every pair of eyes on the bus slowly turned to watch the dead man.

He groaned.

Slowly, so slowly, he lifted his head, and began to draw in air in great rattling breaths. His skin was pale, frightfully pale, with a sickly tinge of green, and his eyes- such eyes I hope I will never see again. Completely blank, unfocused, yet somehow conveying a feeling of deep pain and despair.

With another groan he stumbled to his feet, arms outstretched, no longer human but among the living dead.

A woman screamed. The bus had come to a stop, all of its occupants shoving ruthlessly to get out the tiny door. Neighbors who had once sat and talked politely on the bus ride were now clawing and kicking each other to get through.

I backed away slowly; to my horror I was at the back of the bus. I looked to the front and saw it was clogged with a surging mass of human panic, and I realized I was trapped.

The old man stomped slowly towards me, his eyes still unfocused, saliva dripping from his twisted mouth as he screeched hideously. I thought of my aunt and uncle, of my brother, darling brother, who I would never see again, and I thought of the young man who I had sat on the bus next to every single day yet never learned his name.

In an instant the living corpse sprung at me, and in the same instant a man had flung himself in front of me and thrown off the corpse with a baseball bat. The twisted body slid down the bus aisle, colliding with the back of the bus with a hideous moan. I looked at my savior, standing in front of me, and saw him – the young man, breathing heavily, wielding the baseball bat, his black hair thrown across his eyes – the man who, although he didn't even know my name, risked himself to rescue me. I knew now that I had never loved before.

He turned to face me. "Come on," he said, and grabbed my hand. At this point we were the only two left on the bus, and we took the opportunity to dash toward the now unclogged door.

Even as we reached the front of the bus, I knew something was wrong. As the hairs on the back of my neck began to prickle, I turned and saw the undead body, now back on its feet. It had spotted us and was roaring with rage, and even as I descended the steps at the door I could hear it charging for us.

"Go!" The man I loved shoved me off the bus even as the living corpse fell upon him. It was twice as fast as a living human, and God knows how many times more frightening. As I hit the asphalt street with a thud, I looked and saw the man wrestling with the corpse, trying to dislodge the hideous screeching thing with his bare hands. I ran back up the stairs of the bus, grabbed the baseball bat that the man had dropped, then hit the corpse as hard as I could. There was a dull thud, and the thing slid silent to the ground, freeing the young man.

I gripped the bat and hit the corpse again, again and again, until its head was bashed in and its brains leaked onto the floor of the bus. No inhuman groan would again escape those twisted lips.

Then I looked up and saw him. I never really realized how young he was, probably about my age, nineteen or twenty, barely more than a boy. He stood shaking, breathing hard; our eyes met and we could do nothing but stand and stare. Then with a horrible sinking feeling I watched him moan and slide to the floor.

I rushed to him, falling next to him. I did not want to lose him, not after this, not after I had so recently and so suddenly realized I loved him.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

He was breathing fast and hard. "I'm alright, really . . ." he trailed off. "Just tired."

I examined him but saw no injuries, no blood. I thought he was simply suffering from shock. He would be alright, I knew he would. I wrapped his arms around my shoulders and dragged him down the stairs and off the bus.

A huge crowd of people was now surrounding the bus, watching, wide-eyed and in terror. All street traffic had come to a stop. A man I recognized as the bus driver rushed to me and helped support the young man.

"I called the police," he explained rapidly. "There are ambulances and a Quarantine Team on the way."

"It's alright," I said darkly. "I took care of it for them."

We placed the young man down on a sidewalk bench and I sat down next to him.

"Are you sure you're alright?" I asked.

He nodded. His breath had returned to normal. "Yeah, I'm fine, I just never . . . I never thought I'd have to do that."

I knew what he meant. We had all been taught about the infected, all been drilled what to do in case of an outbreak, but we never really expected to have to face it. No one should ever have to.

"You saved my life," I told him.

He gave a heroic grin. "You saved mine."

"Then I guess we're square."

"I guess so."

At this point the crowd had lost interest in the two of us and had moved onto the bus, all trying to sneak a peak at the mutilated lifeless body within, none daring to get too close.

"My God," I said, half to myself. "No one should ever have to live to see that." I must have looked rather shaken, because he put an arm around me. I felt suddenly happy, as if everything was alright in the world; I could have stayed on that bench with him forever and been the happiest girl in the world.

It was then he gave a little moan of pain and slid down a little. I looked over at him, alarmed.

"You've been hurt!" I supported his head with my hand, but I could see no injury. Then I felt it, something warm and hot, flowing down my hand. I lifted his head, and to my horror, saw a bloody gaping wound in the back of his neck.

He had been bitten.


End file.
